Xiaomi Might Relinquish Its Price/Performance Phones With A $600 Device

For years, Xiaomi had a tried and tested formula that allowed the company to sell a massive number of units for notoriously low profit margins. This allowed the firm to gain a hefty amount of goodwill and thus the company also gained the moniker ‘The Apple of China’. However, it seems that the business model that Xiaomi relied so much upon might be getting changed a little bit, as it plans to introduce quite an expensive smartphone in the near future.

Xiaomi Prepping A $600 For The Future – Is This The End Of The Company’s Affordably Priced Handsets?

According to Xiaomi co-founder Liwan Jiang, the company is going to be rolling out an expensive flagship, which from the looks of it, might be the highly anticipated Mi Note 2. With the higher price tag, Xiaomi can incorporate better features inside the flagship. Smartphones that come with a cheaper price does make small sacrifices that you may not notice at first, and with the $600 price tag, we might get to see the following features implemented:

Waterproof chassis

MicroSD card slot

Better performing camera sensors

Pressure sensitive displays

Better quality displays

Ultrasonic fingerprint reader

However, this does not mean at all that the company is going to stop production on its smartphones that carry an impressive price/performance ratio. It’s just that the company is going to start targeting the premium market as well. As for the specifications of Mi Note 2, it is said to sport a phablet form factor with a 5.7-inch screen size, which is the same as the original Mi Note. While the base model of the smartphone is rumored to feature a Snapdragon 820 coupled with 4GB of RAM, the highest configured model is going to be packing a powerful Snapdragon 823 and 6GB of RAM.

Let us hope that to conserve battery life, Xiaomi does not go down the same route as OnePlus 3 and incorporate a tweak that fires up apps slower in order to provide more talk time to the user. Speaking of battery life, a 4,000mAh is going to be present inside, and while it will be smaller than the massive 4,850mAh present inside the gargantuan Mi Max, it will still get the job done.

One of the biggest highlights of Mi Note 2 is that it is rumored to feature 256GB of UFS 2.0 internal storage, which delivers higher read and write speeds compared to the eMMC standard. One other addition that we could be seeing from the handset is an ultrasonic fingerprint reader.

For those that don’t know, an ultrasonic fingerprint reader is said to be more accurate and blazing fast compared to a standard fingerprint reader incorporated in modern day Android handsets. As far as the rest of the specifications and design goes, we do not believe that Xiaomi is going to be investing too many resources in the matter.

Just like Mi5, Mi Note 2 could sport a 3D ceramic chassis, a metal frame, a front and rear glass panel, and we could see the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor placed into the home button. One of the biggest highlights from an affordable smartphone was a 16MP shooter that featured an OIS chip and featured the ability to record 4K videos at 30FPS.

Would you invest in a $600 if Xiaomi ever released one? Let us know your thoughts immediately.